10 ms·

Something that I've noticed recently is that in my work life, I'm finding there's more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of "efficiency". When you en

• Laarlf 5y ago
  Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can fix it.
  • enkid 5y ago
    What does this mean? I'm pretty sure the main alternative- China - is both over regulated and is very bureaucratic.
    • SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      You might be surprised. Enforcement is certainly draconian, but there are not absurdly many regulations, and it is also surprisingly (to westerners) Feudal - personal relationships and high agency in a narrowly defined area are very important to the system functioning.
      • quixoticelixer- 5y ago
        Sorry but you can't be serious that a feudal system is actually a good idea
        • phkahler 5y ago
          Good for who? I'd add Effective at what?
        • SuoDuanDao 5y ago
          Bureaucracy and Feudalism are just opposite poles of a spectrum. Of course the extremes lead to bad outcomes. Not sure what I said that suggested otherwise.
    • Aperocky 5y ago
      > China - is both over regulated and is very bureaucratic. It's complicated, but that's not a correct assessment. China is not very much regulated at all - a regulation must be regular, but the enforcement of rules in China is anything but regular. On one side, you have the wild west (east?) of unregulated capitalism, on the other side, you have the Party coming down with the hammer over things it doesn't like, The bureaucracy mainly serves the latter. Obviously, this is recognized as a problem, rule of law has been the drive for years but the system cannot and does not change over a day.
      • enkid 5y ago
        Sure. I was being mostly flippant, and you're correct, a regulation has to be regular. But I doubt the OP is seriously advocation we start inconsistently applying laws.
        • sfink 5y ago
          Start? I have been reading many, many news reports that I can summarize as inconsistently applying laws. The US just went through 4 years of an administration that flagrantly violated laws, got caught, and escaped punishment. The wave of evidence associated with police brutality proves that not all are equal before the law. Corruption is endemic in our whole system -- people with resources can avoid punishment for embezzlement, theft, rape, "disorderly conduct", and a long list of other crimes. The system has enormous opportunity for deciding what to prosecute and how tough of punishments to mete out -- which is good, in many ways, since rigid universally applied rules don't actually produce good outcomes -- and we have overwhelming evidence that that leeway is applied to systemically advantage certain groups and disadvantage others. This shouldn't be hard to believe, since it's everywhere. Not just racial or otherwise disadvantaged groups; it includes "old boys' clubs", friends protecting friends, and cases where harmed people resort to a pastor or elder rather than the justice system. It's really not hard to find examples where the favored people are given special treatment, including immunity to laws. So starting to inconsistently apply laws isn't really the issue. We'd have to, at some point in time, have consistently applied laws in the first place for that to matter. It's only a matter of degree, and flavor -- eastern systems seem to be more ok with granting leeway based on personal relationships. Western systems tend to be very suspicious of that, and depend more on who has the resources or formal connections. But no system in the world has long lasted without some amount of leeway / wiggle room / corruption.
    • Laarlf 5y ago
      The main alternative is noticing what went wrong over the last 70 or so years in the west and fixing that. You cannot escape the madness because globalisation made most countries very similiar. Growing the governments further and further did not help anyone but the biggest of companies. And because the chinese really don't care a lot about regulations or bureaucracy, they actually achieve something.
      • throwaway6734 5y ago
        Achieve what exactly? Where is china producing cutting edge tech? They've consistently failed at in house chip design and production over the last 50 years. Most major tech breakthroughs are still coming out of west plus japan and SK.
        • Laarlf 5y ago
          Comparably rapid growth of economy and political influence
          • idiotsecant 5y ago
            At the cost of enormous damage to the health of Chinese citizens, the repression of Chinese minorities, and rampant destruction of Chinese ecology. Make no mistake, China is just as deeply sick as the west, perhaps more so - it just manifests in different ways.
        • thesuitonym 5y ago
          Where do you think cutting edge tech is actually produced?
          • throwaway6734 5y ago
            the US, Europe, Japan, SK
            • CRConrad 5y ago
  • periheli0n 5y ago
    There is a whole spectrum of bureaucracy and overregulation in the “West”. The EU is probably worst. The US are quite relaxed in comparison. The UK is somewhere in the middle.
    • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      > The US are quite relaxed in comparison. This is basically a myth at this point, bolstered by how much more we complain about it. The US made the colossal mistake of trying to do regulation at the federal level, basically equivalent to doing it at the EU level, which the EU is now attempting to do more of and discovering what a trash fire it is. And one of the big reasons for that is that the more centrally the regulation happens, the more corruption it attracts. That's where the US got the reputation for not regulating -- it's not that there aren't rules or that the rules aren't long and arduous and inefficient. It's that they're, on top of that, less effective because there is more regulatory capture by incumbents.
      • Laarlf 5y ago
        YES YES YES. Policies and laws should be more local to adhere to the local situations in local areas. A politician in Berlin cannot understand the situation in a random town with 500 inhabitants and therefore should rarely have something to say about how life functions there.
        • HWR_14 5y ago
          Do the needs of that town with 500 inhabitants require different streaming laws? Freedom to repair laws. Special export restrictions? Should they be allowed to dump chemicals in the water we all share? Host servers that serve copyrighted material? What needs do they have that evil laws are ignoring.
          • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
            > Do the needs of that town with 500 inhabitants require different streaming laws? Freedom to repair laws. Special export restrictions? A town with 500 inhabitants isn't required to have different streaming laws or freedom to repair laws etc. They could all pass the same ones. But if the state of Colorado thinks that the rules in New York are too favorable to device makers and the state of Alaska doesn't care to have any laws on the matter at all then why shouldn't the people there be able to make their own choices? If the cost of living is dramatically lower in Wichita Falls, Texas than it is in San Francisco, California, what sense does it make to have a federal minimum wage instead of allowing each place to choose appropriate to their local economy? > Should they be allowed to dump chemicals in the water we all share? Pollution that crosses state lines is the purpose of federal courts. You don't need federal regulations for that, just an outright complete prohibition on it and penalties for the offending state. > Host servers that serve copyrighted material? That ship has sailed, hasn't it? It's a global internet. The Pirate Bay is still up. Does it really matter if it's hosted in North Dakota or Sweden or wherever it is now? And we could most certainly stand to not have DMCA 1201 everywhere.
  • createmyname 5y ago
    this is the best thing you as a person have. believe me. the point you lost all those regulations etc. some idiot will come and make you miserable... you won't even be able to believe you are controlled and manipulated by a idiot bunch! until then have fun...
    • Laarlf 5y ago
      You are always controlled and manipulated by idiots. The question is: how much can you do about that without doing something unlawful?
  • jjk166 5y ago
    The problem is not so much that we have excessive regulation and bureaucracy but rather that we have a strong tendency to put regulations in place but never evaluate how they are actually performing nor modify them if they are performing poorly. For some reason we equate implementing a rule intended to solve a problem with actually solving the problem - those who implement the policy are praised for doing so long before any improvement in the actual situation is ever seen, and being opposed to the policy intended to solve the problem is widely construed as being opposed to solving the problem itself, even if there is evidence the policy makes the real problem worse. Finally policies are often evaluated based on the message their implementation conveys rather than the actual effects of the policies - for example despite zero tolerance policies being almost universally seen as extremely poor way to deal with complicated issues, they are frequently implemented to express how important the problem they were meant to solve is. So long as we don't make decisions based on efficacy, of course effectiveness will degrade over time.
  • duxup 5y ago
    Bureaucracy seems like it is tied to human nature.
  • hayst4ck 5y ago
    > Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. [citation needed] I think it's pretty clear we are both over and under regulating. Can you tell me the basis/primary purpose of regulation? Can you tell me what the the primary benefit of bureaucracy is?
  • Nasrudith 5y ago
    Bueracracies and overregulation are essentially alternatives to fiefdoms by constraining abusable levels of discretion. Fiefdoms lead to outright open corruption which make the readilly lobbied look like choir boys in comparison. The stereotypical "third world levels of corruption" situations where secured loyalty to the regime matters more than competence. It is yet another tiresome situation of "sucks but we don't really have anything better". We can and should attempt to streamline them but that is nontrivial, especially politically.
  • mbrodersen 5y ago
    Luckily for the west, over regulation and bureaucracy is done equally "well" by non-westerners. If the competition is equally incompetent, you can still do quite well.
• rcfaj7obqrkayhn 5y ago
  also feel like these processes are there so when the crap hits the fan, there's a trail to see whom to point the fingers at. everyone is just trying to cover their own butts
  • throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
    Or (maybe same idea just phrased a different way) shit hit the fan in the past and these were put in place to "prevent it" from occurring again. Postmortem driven development. Do you really need to worry about someone making the same mistake again? Answer to that question probably depends mostly on the type of organization (size, complexity, turnover, ect..) you're working for.
  • periheli0n 5y ago
    Correct. That’s what I tell newcomers in my org during onboarding, when they start to wonder why there are so many seemingly pointless bureaucratic processes: it’s all about arse covering. This is by far the best justification for bureaucracy. It’s also a sign that many things went wrong previously, since every rule has been created because somebody screwed up.
  • allenu 5y ago
    I think there's low-key some of that, as a sort of way to "pass the buck", i.e. somebody who owns some outcome thinks, I don't like how the output of this system, let me go upstream and talk to this team to see if they can take on some new process to improve the output I care about. A lot of this is also just "good intentions". Somebody encounters a problem and thinks "I want to prevent this problem, so I am going to propose this process to avoid it". It works if you have a small number of these processes, but once it gets to a large number, now you're frozen by bureaucracy. Every time you do something, you need to look up the exact process to get it done.
• periheli0n 5y ago
  Reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, where he described the ancient world being so stuck in a set of fixed algorithms for how to do things that made any progress impossible. Only the Babylonian Confusion fixed this deadlock by destroying the ability to communicate (and exchange algorithms). Highly recommended read.
  • pantalaimon 5y ago
    Isaac Asimov describes a similar situation about the downfall of the Galactic Empire in „Foundations“ It's basically the fall of the Roman Empire, but set in the future and with a outpost at the edge of the galaxy to preserve some of the knowledge across the dark ages.
    • periheli0n 5y ago
      Psychohistory FTW ;)
      • pantalaimon 5y ago
        Or as it's called these days Big Data
        • CRConrad 5y ago
          Yeah, Asimov's "psychohistory" was also an empty fictional buzzword.
• mlac 5y ago
  The thing that kills me about the ticketing systems is that they are often put into place in a way that is locally efficient but does not make sense globally. For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is supported). What often happens is that the application owner now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they see once (or less) per year. That work has been offloaded from a single team (measurable impact to efficiency) to immeasurable shadow work for others in the organization. A form that would take 1 minute of effort from the team that runs the upgrade to fill out and track, because they are in it all day, ends up taking a half hour, cut across multiple starts and stops due to other similar interruptions. This becomes pervasive (book your own travel with this system, book your own PTO here, track your time here, fill out tickets for this system, use the help desk ticketing system to request an application installation) and ends up eating a huge chunk of employee time doing unfamiliar overhead tasks on systems optimized for the team doing the work and not the customer. I think we are getting to the point where all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently.
  • jerome-jh 5y ago
    Great insight! It literally happened in my company where the system to order physical goods is so complicated and ugly. Now a secretary handles feeding and tracking requests in this system. BTW our time tracking tool is a company wide motivation killer that costed 300k€ and does not auto-fill holidays.
    • thesuitonym 5y ago
      >BTW our time tracking tool is a company wide motivation killer HINT: They all are.
      • pantalaimon 5y ago
        With cryptic overly specific tasks and one that ends up being the 'catch all' for everything that doesn't fit one of the narrow categories?
• arthur_sav 5y ago
  That's true for most things in life. Some people "define a process / lay the foundation" and many more build on top of that. Processes are disrupted by those few that stop to think of a better way but most people just go along. It does make sense though, if we stopped to think and question every process then we'd be stuck at the start line instead of getting closer to the finish line.
• kippinitreal 5y ago
  The Goal is one of my favorite “business” book (it’s written as a novel). it addresses all of the wasted energy when you target efficiency at the expense of hitting your true goals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)
  • hnick 5y ago
    A truly efficient process would be a bullet in the head at birth bypassing everything else. So yeah, goals aside from efficiency are important. Now some efficiency expert is thinking about how we can skip the bullet to save money.
  • mbrodersen 5y ago
    Yep The Goal is absolutely brilliant. I have read it 3 times and will read it again.
• gherkinnn 5y ago
  I recently heard a clever man argue (can’t remember who), that process does make things more efficient. Starting at chaos, the more things are defined, the more you get done. Until it doesn’t, at which point the relation inverts and you eventually end up stagnant. The problem is that because adding ever more processes worked so far, and now that you’ve hired process people, you continue adding more and more and ever more. The process machine feeds itself.
  • joakleaf 5y ago
    I heard Jim Keller (the chip-designer) say this (or something similar) recently in a podcast with Lex Fridman. It is at the 24.40 mark in "Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast" https://youtu.be/G4hL5Om4IJ4?t=1480 https://youtu.be/G4hL5Om4IJ4?t=1480 "So there is a graph. Y-axis is productivity. X-axis at 0 is chaos and infinity is complete order. As you improve order, you increase productivity. And at some point productivity peaks, and it goes down again. Too much order -- Nothing can happen... Once you start moving towards order, the force vector that drives you towards order is unstoppable."
    • Xunjin 5y ago
      Holy Molly, loved this point of view, really makes sense. Ty for the reference :)
    • biomcgary 5y ago
      I would extend your point to say that any system with infinite chaos or infinite order necessarily lacks information about the world. Any system encoding information about reality necessarily looks like a mix of chaos and order. Unfortunately, any system that perfectly encodes / decodes information about reality has to be more complicated than reality itself.
    • josephg 5y ago
      Yes. At complete chaos you can't see the world, because of information overload. And with complete order, you're no longer acting in response to the world. You're only acting in response to the order you've created. (In practice, models, metrics and beliefs). And at some point that can become self reinforcing if you don't ground your choices out by talking to real humans in the real world. This happens all the time with ideology. If you get too steeped in any particular ideology, you no longer react to the world. You're only reacting to the ideology. (Or the world framed through the ideology). You see this all the time in the blockchain world. So much effort is going into making software and tools that nobody outside of the blockchain world wants or cares about; because it only makes sense from the perspective of other blockchain stuff. And of course, it happens all the time with twitter style politics. "We have a problem! How do I solve it?" "Make the metrics go up! Use a blockchain! Acknowledge your privilege!" "Wait! I haven't told you what my problem is yet!" There's a great quote from Bill Clinton: "The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence."
• spaetzleesser 5y ago
  That’s the price of a low trust environment and management theory where managers are supposed to be able to manage anything without being subject matter experts. Everything needs to be controlled. On the surface it looks more efficient but the result usually isn’t. Government contracting is a prime example. To avoid mistakes and fraud everything gets specified to the last detail. The result is that nobody is empowered or motivated to make changes on the way and everything costs way more than it should and takes longer.
• duxup 5y ago
  A company I worked at was aquired by another company. The new management team talked almost exclusively about tickets and metrics that came from tickets. They knew almost nothing else, if you spoke to them they seemed confused if you didn't describe how it related to tickets. It was weird. A few months into the new company there was an emergency meeting. It was found that the ticket metrics were horribly wrong. They showed that a handful of yokels from the Midwest were closing ticktes faster than the folks in Silicon Valley...and worse they were staying closed and customer's were reporting more positive feedback, just didn't make sense. So they ticket obsessed valley folks declared the guys from the new company must be creating fake tickets and otherwise messing with the numbers! After months of accusations they got someone from the outside to investigate. They found there were widespread fake tickets and other shenanigans.... Everyone up to shenanigans worked for the ticket obsessed valley based managers.... all the folks who made the accusations. They had driven their teams so hard that the employees just played the only game the management responded to, closing tickets.... The resolution? They declared the old metrics bad, reorganized the teams so management had some valley and some midwestern employees so that the pockets of ticket shenanigans wasn't as obvious. Otherwise nothing changed. The ticket mania continued.
  • dreamcompiler 5y ago
    "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  I do not think process is inherently bad. What's bad are people that have "append-only" minds, rarely thinking about how to simplify things (be it code, documentation, tickets) and instead just thinking of adding more and more and more... Live organisms do not work that way. Organisms have anabolic (constructive) and catabolic (destructive) processes. The anabolic processes construct and repair while the destructive processes get rid of the stuff that's no longer needed. Unbounded repositories of code, documentation and tickets suck. I think every team needs full time people doing "catabolic" work on those. Break down tech debt into proper code, break down articles that are hard to read and get rid of obsolete articles, make tickets better and remove the ones that are redundant. The "append-only" mentality is what making people their own enemies.
• ridethebike 5y ago
  Next level: seeing that process is clearly inefficient but still following and defending it with iron-clad "because this is our process" justification.
• tigerlily 5y ago
  Amen
• sharadov 5y ago
  I think this is why a lot of big, corporate entities stop innovating. Too many processes, red tapism all in the same of security and stability. Most workers are too afraid to try something new because of repercussions. Worked in some, decided life is too short for soul-sucking work and decided to work for smaller companies where I can be creative.
• prossercj 5y ago
  > Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some sense of personal agency again. Care to elaborate on this? I was with you right up to the end. In what ways does Slack provide a sense of agency? I feel this might be true in my experience too. Is it because it allows for quicker feedback and validation?
  • allenu 5y ago
    Oh, I don't mean the tool called Slack. I mean slack as in having some time and space to work on things, and also not having work too specified ahead of time. When things are broken down into tickets, it's hard to feel like you're making decisions on the ground level about what to do.